Can Your Website Weather the Storm?

You may be smiling in sunny Los Angeles or enduring the chill of the coming winter in Chicago as the East Coast huddles down for the coming storm that is soon to be upon them. The truth is, while you may be saying a prayer or two for the people who have to weather the coming storm, you may actually be affected by it yourself if your website host’s servers are located where Hurricane Sandy is going to be hitting.

Ask yourself, what are you going to do if the servers hosting your website go down due to a power outage caused by the storm? We can’t control Mother Nature and, let’s face it, she really doesn’t care if your website has downtime or not. You, on the other hand, do care. So it’s crucial that you have a backup plan in place just in case your hosting is affected by Hurricane Sandy as she hits the East Coast with all of her fury.

Preparing for the Worst

First and foremost, the most important aspect of preparing for website downtime is to be sure that you are notified when it happens. As an Alertra customer, you don’t have to worry about this. If your website goes down, we’ll make sure you’re the first to know about it.

What you also need to do is make sure you have an archive of your website’s pages. Without an archive, you’re pretty much up the river without a paddle if your website goes down – especially if any data is lost. If you’re keeping an archive of your website’s pages, you won’t have to worry if your hosting service’s servers crash and lose vital information in the process.

If you fear that the hosting company is going to be down for more than 24 hours, you may want to redirect your DNS to a page that either explains the reason for your site’s outage or you may want to implement your site’s archives and upload them to the temporary hosting site.

Pray for the Best, Prepare for the Worst

Hopefully your hosting company is good enough that it is preparing for such an event and if any downtime occurs, it will be minimal as they will work to get all sites hosted up and running in a different location. If, however, the worst does happen you need to make sure that you do have backup copies of your website and that you are ready and able to point your domain name to a different hosting company – at least for the time being.

While it’s true that people need to weather the storm that is coming to the East Coast, so do companies. If your company’s website is hosted by servers that are in the path of Hurricane Sandy, make sure you keep the above tips in mind. Perhaps even consider calling your hosting company and ask them what they plan on doing if a power outage does hit the servers on the East Coast. A bit of time invested can save you future headaches and give you some peace of mind.